Amnex Enhances Commuter Experience and Fights Car Pollution with Intelligent Transportation Management System on AWS

Amnex Infotechnologies (Amnex), an AWS Partner with a Smart City Competency, is helping the Indian city of Nashik tackle pollution by encouraging people to travel on buses instead of in private cars. The city has made its bus network more efficient using Amnex’s IoT-based Intelligent Transportation Management System (ITMS) which runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The ITMS, which leverages Amazon EC2 instances and AWS Lambda serverless functions, has helped increase route earnings by 150 percent per kilometer as more than one million extra citizens make their daily commutes on the buses each month.

With India’s population expected to surpass 1.4 billion and reach 43 percent urbanization by 2035, cities across India are launching Smart Cities projects to improve the quality of life for residents in urban areas. As one of its initiatives to cut pollution, Nashik, a city of around 8 million in the state of Maharashtra, launched a project to improve its Citilinc bus network so more people would travel on buses rather than in private cars.

Nashik’s bus network was operating inefficiently, with managers unable to optimize the number of buses to run per route or know how many buses to operate during peak hours because of a lack of data. Meanwhile, customers had no real-time information on travel conditions across the network to help them plan their journeys.

AWS Partner Amnex Infotechnologies (Amnex), based in Ahmedabad, won a public tender to help Nashik Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Limited (NMPML), the private-sector company running Citilinc, establish a smarter transportation network. NMPML wanted to deploy Amnex’s Intelligent Transportation Management System (ITMS) to provide managers with real-time data to make bus dispatching and routing decisions on-the-fly and to deliver network updates to passengers via a mobile app.

Amnex built the ITMS on AWS to access scalable and dependable IT resources. “With AWS, we ensure seamless integrations, high availability, and enhanced security for our applications,” says Rahul Raut, an Amnex Project Manager responsible for implementing customer solutions.

The company developed its ITMS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for core processing and to support its PostgreSQL database services. The ITMS also uses AWS Lambda serverless functions for live processing requirements and to schedule services, while Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance storage for Amazon EC2 instances. In recognition of its AWS-powered ITMS, Amnex achieved the AWS Smart City Competency.

Following initial analysis and design work, Amnex established a dedicated command center to oversee the deployment of ITMS and maintain communication with Citilinc personnel throughout the process.

The ITMS offers Citilinc personnel access to various features, including an Automated Vehicle Location System, Automated Fare Collection System, Planning and Scheduling System, Depot Management System, Passenger Information System, Incident Management System, and Finance and Accounting Management System. Milind Band, general manager for operations at Citilinc, says, “Amnex’s AWS-based solution provides a cost-effective and efficient platform for Citilinc to streamline its operations and delivers positive user experiences.”

Thanks to the improved efficiency and reliability brought by ITMS, Citilinc has achieved a substantial 150 percent increase in route earnings per kilometer. The organization has automated time-consuming tasks like employee scheduling, inspections, and planning vehicle maintenance. At the same time, the digitization of payments has minimized revenue loss.

At bus depots, bus inspectors use tablets to complete 48 checks on each bus before it departs. Maintenance mechanics access the data to plan their workloads. In Citilinc’s offices, staff use the Finance and Accounting Management System to streamline payment processes, settling contractor payments digitally.

The automation of employee scheduling has led to an increase in driver and conductor job satisfaction as human error has been eliminated. Amnex's programming of the ITMS also ensures compliance with labor laws, triggering alerts if schedules lack sufficient break periods. Moreover, employee timekeeping has improved as drivers and conductors mark their attendance through QR codes when entering assigned buses.

Today, bus users have access to a Citilinc mobile app, available for Android and iOS-based devices, to check bus schedules, real-time locations of the buses, book tickets, and provide feedback on the bus services. More Nashik citizens are using the bus service, with average daily commuter numbers rising from 10,000 to 60,000. The overall number of people using the bus network has also increased, reaching several million per month. Many passengers have expressed their satisfaction through the app, citing an enhanced sense of safety owing to the presence of security cameras on every bus, the convenient digital ticketing system, and the improved customer service assistance.

One of the most significant outcomes from the project is the change in perceptions of the bus network. An increasing number of residents see Citilinc buses as a viable alternative to private cars—helping Nashik create a smarter, more sustainable urban environment. Band says, “With more people traveling on the buses, we can reduce the city’s air pollution, making it a safer and more pleasant place for all of us to live.”